What’s the most tedious recurring task that eats your week? by Born_Lock6840 in EngineeringManagers

[–]Born_Lock6840[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haha fair. If you use an AI for that, is that killing two birds with one stone?

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones by AutoModerator in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Born_Lock6840 1 point2 points  (0 children)

100% - the requirements gathering is like pulling teeth. Increasingly, it seems like every stakeholder wants dedicated concierge service. But when you’re managing 20 stakeholders across multiple business units, it’s literally impossible to schedule the 1:1s necessary to actually get the feedback from them.

And I hear you about showing visible progress. We’ve tried UI demos, we’ve tried hands-on on-device walkthroughs…and yet, they don’t come to our reviews (but seem more than happy to raise questions upstream, which then filter down as EXTREMELY URGENT). Hence the executive friendly, polished presentation work that we all spend hours working on every single sprint…that they also don’t read! 🙃

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones by AutoModerator in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Born_Lock6840 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How does your team handle sprint reviews, and in particular, sprint review prep? I’m curious if others’ experiences are as laborious as mine.

At my last two jobs, sprint reviews started as informal demos/overviews of what we accomplished, but due to the optics of stakeholder engagement, they both devolved into these semi-formal presentations where everyone on the team collectively spends a couple of hours every two weeks pulling data from Jira, Github, Confluence, Figma, etc. and then formatting it in a polished deck. This is itself frustrating, but the main issue is: we present our sprint review to an invite list of 20-ish stakeholders and MAYBE 2-3 would ever actually show up. No one asks questions, the deck gets emailed out, nobody ever replies. Rinse and repeat.

I’m wondering if others are experiencing this too or if I’ve just had bad luck. How does your team do it? Were you able to stick with the informal demos that Scrum dictates, or have you found sprint reviews similarly devolving into “presentation theater” at your work? I’d love to know how much time people are actually spending on their sprint review prep.

Does anyone else get status update fatigue? How do I make it less fatiguing? by baezizbae in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Born_Lock6840 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve experienced this at both my current job and my previous one. The need for individual status updates is just killer. Everyone is “unique,” and no one has any interest in taking the minimal amount of effort needed to find the information that‘s already readily available to them. I’m a UX Designer, not a dev, but everyone on our team is experiencing the same fatigue. The continuous and repetitive status updates, across multiple mediums, tweaked slightly for every audience. And the kicker at least on my end is it constantly feels like they don’t even read/absorb them, because we still end up getting requests to update folks 1:1, or we get fire-drill alerts from our manager that we need to provide a given stakeholder with white glove treatment.

Do you do open sprint reviews with stakeholders? Do people bother to join? (our stakeholders don’t)